This evening the topic is “How ‘Irish’ Was the Irish Waterfront?” That’s a meaningful question in itself. We’ve been hewing closely to the text (by our standards) at events thus far, and so too tonight. Yet it also feels like time to go sub-textual: too many stories in the newspapers about codes of silence and acts of religious violence made to disappear like the bodies of slain longshoremen tossed in the North River. Then only to resurface; it was each April in fact that saw the Hudson’s warming waters yield its annual harvest of the dockworker dead. We’ll be remembering the living and the dead.

On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York by James T. Fisher (Cornell University Press)
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